We're big fans of
“anti-social” media!

A safe place to
reflect and plan

Fed up with the fakery, insecurity and self-consciousness of social media? We were.

Social media wasn’t making us happy. But instead of say, a notebook or traditional diary, we still wanted an online place to make notes so privately, that no one else could see them: anti-social media! Then we realised that, if selected parts could be made available just to our nearest & dearest, we’d have the best of both worlds.

Life’s biggest reality check: a brush with death

We’d talked about the need for Happiplans. Our founder’s spell in intensive care, made it happen.

Lying in her ICU bed, only too aware that her chances were 50/50 at best and unable to speak or write, our founder Clare felt overwhelmed by the number of loose ends in her life and the instructions she wanted to leave, but couldn’t. Who else knew about the routines of her pre-school age son, or of her pets? Did her husband know how to access her online accounts or where all the insurance documents were? How could she tell him about the secret holiday she had arranged? Clare realised that, as well as a place to mark life’s big occasions and plan for the best for herself and her loved ones, she needed a place to leave a plan for them,. if she wasn’t there at all.

Valuable features for all generations

The ages of our founding team ranged from teenagers to over 60, to make sure that Happiplans would be designed for all.

The predictably differing strength of appeal of each Happiplans feature to different generations is, up to a point, a welcome and good thing. Teenagers enthuse about the always-private Notes to Self. Ambitious young adults are immediately curious about the Future Plans feature, whilst older adults, having a more life to reflect upon, naturally gravitate first, towards the Timeline. But how much of that is unconscious following of convention?

There is a good argument for using Happiplans to help you buck the trend. If you are young, look back now at what has shaped you. How much of a hold do you want those things to continue to have over you? If you are elderly, should you focus on nostalgia, or on making the coming years, ones that you and your loved ones will feel good about, and grateful for?

And, whatever your age, we all have to accept that there no guarantee we’ll be alive tomorrow. so it makes sense to set out a ‘Plan B’ for your loved ones, via the Emergency Access feature.

Our values

In addition to ‘motherhood and apple pie’, the values which set us apart from the mainstream are:

• Privacy is everything

  Being totally open with yourself is hard but, with privacy, possible. Sometimes, those we have learned to trust, can help. Without reliable privacy, it’s just impossible: all of us raise our guard! This is why we have moved away from the main social media platforms and why we define and protect the privacy of Happiplans customers, so jealously.

• Our lives are for us, not a show for others

  Making and consuming mainstream social media posts turns us all into actors. We put on a show, hoping the audience will love us. It seems to us that this pushes everyone to be anything but authentic and to make decisions based not on what is best for us, but for the audience.

• The unexpected happens every day: we owe it to each other, to make provision

  On an average day, most of us are fine. But over 40 people aged 15 to 44 in England & Wales, die*. So we have a duty to our loved ones to leave a plan, should life not go according to plan.
  *Source: ONS. Average 2010 – 2019